OK, your website is up and running, your social media is ticking along nicely – But what next? Well it’s time to List Build.
List building (that would be a list of email addresses) allows you to send newsletter / e-shot / html newsletter / email marketing to these people at least once a month (all at the same time) with your offers, news, updates, blog posts and events etc straight into their inbox – The best thing about this is that they actually want to hear from you, and will most likely buy something from you as a result.
I use MailChimp to email market – It’s brilliant, amazing and for the most part FREE, so only costs your time in getting things right on there. Briefly I’ll go through the fundamentals of what you need to put your Freebie into place below however…
To get people onto your list you kind of need to bribe them – Just the way the quick thinking, low attention span online world works at the moment in marketing I’m afraid – The bride works in way of you giving away some FREE information that is your expertise in the form of an eBook – It’s actually a Word document formatted nicely and saved as a PDF (again to keep the costs down) but works well to read on most devices.
You need to give something of value – I can’t stress this enough – I’ve had clients come to me in the past with an eBook on “5 reasons to buy this, this and that from me and why this is the best etc etc” boring, no – I want some of your premium content if I’m going to give you my email address – I want the ‘how to’ and the ‘how you’. My current Freebie on my main site is a Guide to Facebook Advertising – It’s the actual eBook I give away on my courses, so it’s something of value.
Ideas for FREE eBooks for you might be as follows – They don’t need to be long – 5 pages is fine and then formatting can be added to that.
- Guide to Time Management
- Ideas for Social Media postings
- Ideas for Blog postings
- My guide to how this works
- My guide to how that works
- Guide to working with a your type of business – How we do it behind the scenes!
- Using Social Media for your Business
- The secrets behind how a (your business type) does it all
Format your eBook with relevant copyright information after you have written it, add in a cover image, content page – Make it look professional. Now this is the important part and where we earn some of our time back… Add in all of your contact details and a definite call to action on the last page, so that way people can contact you when they’ve read your great content.
In brief here is how to get your FREE eBook sign up box to happen in 5 steps… Bear with me and please ask any questions at the end.
- Set up a new list in MailChimp called something like Website Sign Ups
- In the General Forms section alter the Header of the Form so that your business header is present
- Look for the Thank You page, and edit the return (auto response) email with a link to your eBook which you then upload your PDF to MailChimp’s File system.
- Add in an image of the eBook cover to this return email (auto response) also. Write in the email to ask your audience to download.
- Use the Embed Code (forms) to put the sign up box onto your website (WordPress you can use a Text Widget and paste the code into there) Using Divi? Use the email opt-in / align MailChimp API and edit the box to have the book cover in there. You can make a little 3d image book cover in Photoshop quite simply.
And erm that’s it! Test everything to see that it works by signing up to your own list. Any problems, just Contact Me, (details below!) – I also offer a course on how to do this.
Update October 2022…
We need them in for SEO and for showing other people that we like them and support them (call it a PR exercise if you will), but they are conveniently ‘hidden’ so that people don’t leave your site. Though I do code them to open in a new tab, which I’ll show you how to do sometime. Sometime we might want people to click e.g. an affiliate link, so we will give more attention to that, but most likely will be getting a return from a person we are linking to or trying to push something on another site.